


Deck the Tree with False Blossoms

by ishie



Category: Leverage
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-18
Updated: 2009-12-18
Packaged: 2017-10-04 13:45:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ishie/pseuds/ishie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, they take a job they shouldn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Deck the Tree with False Blossoms

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lovelokest](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovelokest/gifts).



> Lovelokest, I hope you enjoy this! I was lucky enough to grab this pinch hit and the story just sort of fell out of my head. Thanks so much for requesting it!
> 
> Title from the Thirty-Six Strategems. Huge thanks to Lexie and Kaizoku for the beta!

Once upon a time, they take a job they shouldn't.

\---

Parker's face was as still as death. Only the slightest flicker of movement at the corners of her eyes betrayed that she was actually paying attention to the conversation swirling around her.

"What are you doing?" Eliot asked, his eyes narrowed on hers. Somehow, though he'd never thought it possible, she'd found something to do that was creepier than when she tried to practice flirting.

"Sophie bet me $5000 that I couldn't stop rolling my eyes when one of you says something stupid," she said, moving only her lips.

"What was stupid about that?" Hardison protested. "All I'm saying is that we're gonna have to bring the bloody Ice Man out of cold storage, luv."

"Look," Nate interjected before he could inflict any more of his accent on them, "we want to get on the inside on this thing, we need a hook. You have no idea how much it pains me to say this but the Ice Man's our best option." He took another healthy belt of black coffee, as much for the burn sliding down his throat as for washing away the bad taste the words left in his mouth.

They watched in horrified fascination as Parker's expression grew more and more strained before she collapsed face-first on the table. "I don't want to give up my _money_," she moaned. "But you guys are making it so _hard_."

\---

This is what happens when they try to pull a con without Sophie. Not just without her physical presence, but without her guidance over crappy cell phone connections as their words bounce between towers and satellites and relays. They've done all right for themselves since she's been gone - they are professionals after all - but there's something missing.

"Something indefinable, ineffable," Nate would say if you pressed him on it and maybe drugged him first. You might also have to tell him to repeat after you to get those exact words, but the essence is the same.

"Something totally definable," would be Eliot's take, as long as he knew Nate wasn't within earshot. "She's the mom, he's the dad, we're the bratty kids." After imparting that wisdom, he would shrug and go back to chopping endives.

"Nah, she ain't the mom," Hardison would argue as he tried to sneak one of the rolls still steaming on the counter. Not so much because he doesn't agree, but because arguing with Eliot is habit. "She's like our den mother or something."

"Like I said, 'the mom'."

"Man, come on, you know what I mean. She can be pretty maternal, I'll grant you that, but she's not sitting around baking cookies for us-"

"Your definition of motherhood is problematic," Parker would interrupt. "Eliot bakes the cookies. Sophie's just Sophie."

Since no one's ever won an argument with Parker that didn't end with her threatening various vital organs (and some not so vital but certainly pleasurable body parts), they would let her definition stand.

\---

"It's _perfect_," Parker cooed as she leaned over the display case. Her hands smoothed down the front of her dress, over the obscenely swollen belly under it. "Sweetie, isn't it just so _precious_?"

Eliot rolled his eyes behind his dark glasses. "I'm gonna kill both of you if you don't stop making me want to puke," he muttered over the comm link.

Eight feet away, Hardison stuttered through the rest of a sentence then drew the mark off to the side of the room.

"Herrera, my man, no offense to your merchandise but I give a sweet fuck-all about this showroom bollocks. Just give me old ball and chain whatever she wants and we can be about our business, yeah?"

His accent veered dangerously close to _Crocodile Dundee_ territory but the illusion held long enough for Parker to waddle from the store, a shiny gold-embossed shopping bag dangling from one hand. Eliot trailed behind her, swinging his head from side to side as if his number one priority was to fend off potential attackers. Or to aim the miniature camera in the frame of his glasses in every conceivable direction.

"Great job," Nate said in their heads. "Pictures are coming in crystal-clear. Hardison, you've got ten minutes to get our guy on board but I think we've got this one sewn up."

\---

The thing about cons, especially ones that were supposed to be simple in-and-out jobs, was that they never turned out that way. Even when you thought everything was going according to plan, there was always some massive clusterfuck skimming along below the surface, just waiting to rear up and snatch victory from your hands.

Nate knew this, but he sometimes couldn't help himself, which is why he ended up saying stupid shit like "we've got this one sewn up" before they'd even finished setting the bait.

Some might call it sloppy. Some might call it an overabundance of optimism. Some might call it tempting fate.

Eliot called it "fucking stupid! Why the hell did we let him do the Ice Man again? That shit hasn't worked in five years. And it barely worked then! Jesus _fucking_ Christ."

While he muttered and paced behind him, Nate stared at a monitor and tapped a finger against his lips. He tried to see a way clear to untangling the mess that had exploded the minute Parker and Eliot walked out of the store.

Parker reached under her dress and pulled a pair of knives from her fake belly.

On the comm link, Hardison was still nervously trying to talk his way out. "Listen, mate, I don't know nothing 'bout no side business. I swear on me own mum. You know how some blokes are all about arses or tits or legs? I'm straight-up diamonds. You can just forget about all that other rubbish like kidnap- You know what? I don't even want to make a list here, guv. Just talk diamonds to me. That's all I give a damn about."

"What about your lovely bride?" Herrera's voice rasped close enough to Hardison's jaw that they could all hear the slight whistle in his breath.

"Oi, you should _see_ the pair of diamonds on that bird."

Parker's smile glinted in the blue glow from the monitors as she twirled the knives in her hands. "Isn't that so sweet of him to say?" she cooed at Eliot.

"Seriously, I will end you."

\---

The thing about Sophie being gone is that none of them really understand why she keeps leaving.

Nate gets the closest, but he can't let himself think about it. He let himself get too personal, years ago, and he has been in full-on retreat mode ever since.

Parker thinks it's something she did, or she thought that until Sophie laughed sadly into the phone and told her no. Now she thinks it's something Nate did. Even if that's not the truth, it's close enough that she's going to stick with it.

Eliot doesn't really care. He knows Sophie will work through whatever it is, and she'll come home when she's ready just like she always does. She'll bring a bag overflowing with local delicacies when she comes back, too, if she knows what's good for her.

Hardison has lots of theories about why she's gone - everything from a Mulder-style classic ditching to a complicated thing with pod people and possibly witchcraft. He keeps them to himself and pulls up her tracking signal on his laptop every night before he goes to bed.

Sophie, for her part, thinks she knows why she left. It's the same reason she left the last time, and the time before that. That's about as far as she's gotten with it.

\---

They were three steps into a complicated plan to break Hardison out when he suddenly stumbled on the right combination of convoluted explanations and promises. When he got back to the penthouse apartment they were using as their command center, Parker perched on the coffee table in front of him and patted his knee every few minutes.

Nate switched on the coffeemaker and asked Hardison to pull up the blueprints again.

"So. Birmingham Bash?" Eliot asked.

Nate shook his head and pulled a mug off the shelf. "Not enough players. He's already seen the three of you."

No one made the suggestion they were all thinking. Each of them had made an unspoken promise to leave Sophie out of this one.

"Two-fisted Galoot?"

Parker made a face and patted Hardison's knee until he shook off her hand. "I don't think we can get that much mylar on a weekend."

"We could always go for an Ocean's Thirteen," Hardison suggested. "No one understands what happened in that movie anyway."

\---

The longer Sophie is away, the harder it is for her to remember why she left in the first place.

There's a dynamic between the other four that she envies. They love the tools of their particular trades and they speak in technical terms that mostly float over her head. For Sophie, the thrill isn't just about beating someone at their own crooked game. Even with her concerns about losing herself again, and they are many, she delights in slipping into a new skin with each role she undertakes. In modulating her voice and her movements to suit an elaborate backstory that she rarely has the chance to unveil.

More than that, though, it's the satisfaction of seeing the worry and sadness melt away from a client's face at the end of a job well done.

Her vacations follow a similar routine, every single time. She sits in a richly furnished hotel room in Istanbul, or a terraced flat in Buenos Aires, or an airy villa in Goa, and thinks about being the fifth wheel for weeks.

It always ends the same way: with the realization that without a steering wheel, even the best precision tires in the world will go off-course.

\---

As it turned out, plenty of people were capable of following the twists in a Hollywood blockbuster. Unfortunately, one of them was the guy they were trying to rip off. The only thing Richard Herrera loved more than making a name for himself was George Clooney.

It also didn't help that one of the players they'd recruited in Sophie's absence had at one time been a minor villain in a massively popular telenovela that Herrera's mother watched religiously.

Parker squeezed in between Hardison and Eliot on the floor of the dank room where they were being held. She patted her swollen belly and pouted at Eliot.

"I don't want my baby to grow up in captivity."

"Look, I realize that you're crazy and all but this baby thing is really starting to creep me out," Eliot said, his voice gravelly with irritation.

"Oi, that's the mother of me child you're talking about!" Hardison's eyes didn't quite track with the erratic movement of his head. Whatever they'd slipped into his drink was taking a hell of a long time to wear off.

While Eliot and Parker traded dirty looks and shoulder punches and rib pinches, Nate muttered from the other side of the room, "Don't make me turn this basement around."

Silence blanketed the room until Parker said quietly, as if she'd been thinking about it for a while, "If I was a shark, I could bite our way out of here." She curled her hands into claws next to her face and made growling noises at the ceiling.

Hardison's haze cleared long enough for him to furrow his brow and regard her seriously. "I don't think sharks work like that."

\---

By the time Sophie breezes through customs at Logan, she's starting to worry. None of them have called her in days, not even to complain about the petty injustices that are part and parcel of living and working together in such close proximity.

She punches in the code to access the office voicemail and gets the name of a city, an address, and a password that makes the hair on the back of her neck stand straight up.

The flight to Indianapolis is smooth and calm but she deplanes with eight perfect crescents pressed into the skin of her palms.

She also has a plan.

Unless the requirements are drastically reduced or the competition eliminated, Sophie Devereaux will never be in any danger of winning an Academy Award. She will never be in the running for the Golden Globes, the Emmys, or the Screen Actor's Guild. The Tonys are never going to come knocking on her door. Not even the Genies will recognize her God-given talent.

But put her in front of a greedy tycoon or a morally bankrupt politician, and she puts the Meryl Streeps and Laurence Oliviers of the world to shame. A small-time fence slash wannabe baby broker in Indiana is no match for her considerable skill.

The best part is that she gets to play the hero, something far too rare in both of her chosen professions.

\---

None of them knew exactly how long they had been in the basement room, growing colder and wetter by the minute. Their captors had stripped them of everything but their clothes and the comm pieces snugly fitted into their ears. Even Parker was forced to hand over enough weaponry to liberate a small country, though they had steered clear of her pregnancy belly.

Hardison had finally stopped fighting whatever it was coursing through his bloodstream and passed out, his head nestled against Parker's padded bulk. Eliot was sharpening shards of glass against the floor, ignoring his shredded fingertips until the blood made the mostly useless weapons too slick to grip.

Nate was sitting at the top of the wooden staircase, the back of his head resting against the mildewed door.

"I still say you should just let me fight our way out," Eliot grumbled at him. "Thirty seconds and I'd be through that door."

There was barely enough time for Nate to roll his eyes before the comm link crackled. Parker's eyes rounded and she let out a squeak. In her lap, Hardison woke with a snort.

"Eliot Spencer, I know you're not thinking of ruining my fun," Sophie purred in their ears.

\---

One of these days, Sophie is going to have Hardison set her up with a camera that captures these, her best performances ever. There isn't a casting director in the world who wouldn't crawl across broken glass to hire her after he sees the way she reduces grown men to obsequious morons with only the flick of her wrist and a frosty mid-Atlantic accent.

Within fifteen minutes, she's sailing back out of the dilapidated house with her crew in tow and the ringleader gazing after her with dollar signs in his eyes. Everyone piles into the back of her elegant car and they drive off into the sunset, disappearing just as the first sirens fade up in the distance.

They watch from a safe distance as the cops clean up what they left behind. Parker turns to one side, checking out her wide, round shadow on the ground. She puts her hands to her lower back to complete the illusion of impending motherhood. Behind her, Hardison sneaks glances at the movement of her arms while he tries to rig a signal on his mostly smashed cell. Nate stands with his arms crossed, a grim set to his mouth as social workers bustle out of the building with tiny, blanket-wrapped babies. Next to him, Eliot stretches out on the ground and clasps his hands behind his head as he soaks up the last of the day's sunshine.

Sophie pulls off her wig and shakes out her dark hair. This is what happens when they try to work a job without her: chaos, anarchy, and Parker in a ever more disturbing series of disguises.

"Next time," she says, turning in a slow circle to pin everyone with a disapproving look that barely hides the smile beneath it. "The next time I need a vacation, you're all coming with me."


End file.
